1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to data networks and computer communications across the data networks. More particularly, the invention relates, in part, to the installation and deletion of software applications and their components on wireless devices in selective communication with one or more application download servers across a wireless data network. Also more particularly, the invention relates, in part, to the optional upgrading of a software application on a wireless device during the execution of the software application.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless devices, such as cellular telephones, communicate packets including voice and data over a wireless network. Cellular telephones themselves are being manufactured with increased computing capabilities and are becoming tantamount to personal computers and hand-held personal digital assistants (“PDAs”). These “smart” cellular telephones have installed application programming interfaces (“APIs”) onto their local computer platform that allow software developers to create software applications (commonly referred to as “programs”) that are fully executable on the cellular telephone. The API sits between the wireless device system software and the software application making the cellular telephone computing functionality available to the application without requiring the software developer to have the specific cellular telephone system source code.
The software applications can come pre-loaded at the time the wireless telephone is manufactured, or the user may later request that additional programs be downloaded over cellular telecommunication carrier networks, where the downloaded applications are executable on the wireless telephone. As a result, users of wireless telephones can customize their wireless telephones through the selective downloading of applications, such as games, printed media, stock updates, news, or any other type of information or application that is available for download through the wireless network. In order to manage the cellular telephone resources, the user of the wireless telephone purposefully deletes applications and data from the wireless telephone platform to clear storage space so that new applications can be loaded onto the cleared storage.
In contrast to the larger computer platforms of personal computers and PDAs, wireless devices have limited resources, such as storage and processing, to devote to non-essential applications. Typically, the telecommunication applications have priority of usage of the system resources, with other applications allocated resources as available. The wireless device thus only has a limited capacity for holding all files for applications, and the managing of resources is left up to the discretion of user of the telephone to delete applications to make room for new applications desired downloaded to the wireless device. The wireless device will not otherwise download an application that it does not have the resources to hold and execute.
In seeking to free resources on the wireless device, the user normally cannot remove certain components of a resident application without disabling the entire resident application. If the user sought to delete specific components, such action would controvert the intended freeing of resources as the disabled resident application cannot be restored without full reinstallation of the application. The useless undeleted application components still needlessly take up storage space even though the main application is unexecutable. This all-or-nothing deletion requirement for the resident software applications on the wireless device greatly limits the number of applications that can be resident on the wireless device and available to the user.
Accordingly it would be advantageous to provide a wireless device that can remove certain components of applications while maintaining important data for the application, such as licenses and user-specific data, to maximize the utilization of computer resources on the wireless device. Upon the wireless device requiring the deleted software components to again execute the application, the wireless device can obtain the software components through the wireless network. It is thus to the provision of such a system and method that can control the deletion and reloading of select software application components at the wireless device that the present invention is primarily directed.